This invention relates to containers for collecting animal wastes, and in particular to cat litter boxes which are filled with an absorbant material that absorbs animal urine and moisture from animal feces. This absorbant material is commonly called cat litter.
Manufacturers have sold a wide variety of reusable plastic cat litter boxes to consumers as alternatives to cardboard boxes which often become soggy and acrid with cat urine. To make the job of cleaning the plastic cat litter boxes as bearable as possible, manufacturers have provided plastic inserts or liners. Such liners are invariably contoured, that is, they have heat sealed seams which seal one or more sheets of plastic to form a squat bag-like liner with sides and a bottom to line the sides and bottom of the box.
Plastic cat litter boxes, however, have been manufactured in such a wide variety of different sizes and shapes that no single manufacturer can provide fitting liners for each box size. Rather, manufacturers have generally resorted to providing a "generic" sized liner capable of use in a variety of differently sized boxes. However, the generic liner is too large for many boxes, creating large folds or wrinkles when installed, which often are the fancy of the cat's primitive desires to claw and shred. Some cats also have the peculiar habit of burying the sides of the liner in the cat litter. The shredded or buried liner allows the cat litter--and whatever else is in it--to leak from the liner, forcing the pet owner to do the cleaning job he tried to avoid in using the liner in the first place.
The contoured liners are not inexpensive. They entail heat sealing single or double pieces of plastic to form a squat bag. Often, consumers will try to avoid the expense of contoured liners by purchasing flat plastic or by cutting plastic garbage bags to size because garbage bags are often less expensive as production runs for garbage bags are longer than production runs for cat litter liners. Garbage bags, however, fit no better than the contoured liners or flat liner sheets and result in the same problems with folds and buried sides.
Finally, liners do not eliminate all odor problems. Often, the odor of a cat litter box becomes unbearable, even though much of the litter is still good. A frugal cat owner buys a "pooper-scooper.TM.," a sieve with a short handle, to sift out the odoriferous fecal matter and clumps of cat litter agglomerated with urine. A profligate cat owner will avoid the prolonged olfactory assualt involved in patiently sifting out such matter and throw out the good litter with the bad.